The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

December 16, 2008

Cees Nooteboom

Cees Nooteboom [The Netherlands]1933

Born in The Hague in 1933, Cees Nooteboom was educated in monastery schools in the southern part of The Netherlands. He now lives in Amsterdam, but spends much of the year in Spain and in travel, recently in Australia and Japan.

Although perhaps better known as a novelist and travel writer, poetry is at the core of Nooteboom's oeuvre. His first book, De doden zoeken een huis (1956), contains many of the themes he was to explore throughout his prolific career, including issues relating to time and death. Over the years—despite a pause in his poetic writing from 1964 to 1978—his poetry has grown stronger and more complex. The publication of his collected poetry, Vuurtijd, ijstijd: Gedichten, 1955-1983 in 1984, revealed a poet of intensely sober observation. His first English language collection, The Captain of the Butterflies, was published by Sun & Moon Press in 1997.

Nooteboom is recognized throughout the world for his many novels, including Philip en de anderen (1955), Rituelen (1980, Rituals, 1983)—for which he won the Mobil Oil Pegasus Prize—In Nederland (1984, In the Dutch Mountains, 1987)—which was awarded the Multatuli Prize—and, more recently, Het Volgende Verhaal (1991, The Following Story, 1994). Among his travel writings are Een avond in Isfahan (1978; An Evening in Isfahan) and Berlijnse notities (1990, Notes of Berlin), and, more recently, Roads to Santiago, published in English in 2000.

Hole in the darkthey named the light of moonand with their hands disfigured by itthey wanted its measure

and became a new movementan army of rags and veiled faceshidden in crowns and coatson horses of human flesh.

They did not bear namesother than their ownsome years they are invisibleeyes mouths ears all sealed

there'll be no end to this procession

I see them, see themand burn.

—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr

(from Aanwezig, Atwizig, 1970)

Abschied

Not for someone elsethis foolishness,but for you.

When the high-rise is gone, when this is a plain,and you a statue, self-raised,and I touch you,

When all things suffer like me,nailed down with sorrow, when to know nothingis to snake like a fungas through tissue

you stand still, silvered, splattered, the eastwind vagrantaround you, and around me,I made a diaster out of the ordinary.

I'll forget everything about you, except you.You rage through the space I occupy,your live is fate.

Through your likeness I see the longingfrom which we were expelled. I had offered everything,you had refused everything. You had offered everything,I did not see it.Quiet now.

Death is a male disease.You go around and gather up lifeNow quiet.

—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr

(from Aas, 1982)

Grail

Remember the timethat we were searching for something,something quite precise,a concept, paraphrase, definition,a theme, thesis, supposition.a summa of what we did not know,something we wishedto assume or measure or tallybetween all things obscure?

You know, don't you knowhow we always wandered off, dividingthe concept and the quest,Augustilne the brothels, Albert the numbers,Jorge the mirrors, Immanuel home, Pablo the forms,Wolfgang the colors,Teresa, Blaise, Friedrich, Leonardo, Augustus,always tallying and measuring between words and notes, thinkingamong nuns, soldiers and poets,breaking, looking, splitting,till the bones, the shadow,a glimmer, a narrowing downin senses or images,until in a glass or a numberbut always so brieflya hiccup of a thought, of a way,so endlessly vague became visible?

—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr

(from Aas, 1982)

Cartographyfor Cristina Barroso

I

Only the bird sees what I see,the impassable ways in my hand,a golden and ash-colored beauty,the surprising accidentof a world drawn only once,a though construed of matter,a painting missing its painter,my secret universe.

Oceans, steppes, volcanoes, the hummingof their names from always younger mouths.FMy making hand follows their forms,vein, chasm, slope, ravine,the hidden lines of strata and ore,diary of desert, of wilderness, of mirroring sea,that which I am.

II

Ice age, star time,my past exists in locked-up images,called out by fire and water,a registry of resin and sand.

That is how I show myself,how I hide myselfin ciphers of height and depth,layers of coloron an atlas as big as the world.

III

Measure, says the book of maps.Measure, given.Measure, realBut given by whom?Real for whom?

The tiny plane hovering above the shoreline,shadow of phoenician sails,constellations, plumb line, calipers, ink,the slow page from Trabo,the prows of Aeneas, Odysseus,or how the sea changes to paper,the waves into words,the exactilng task of shrinking,the art of meter and time.

IV

The inner spectaclepiles question upon question.Were the dogs visible on the spit of land?

The death of flies poison of the flowers,the track of the enemy,the surveyor in his hotel?Who followed the train with future dead,measured the slowness of the way?Fate is not set down on maps.Fate is all ours.

Grids, shadilng, scale, the constraintof coordinates, words of magicfor the world as a thing.But I go with my living earthof rivers and marshes, bends and willows,which I compose in my ilmage.When I retrace them I leave my seal,a map paintedof soul.

—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr

(from Zo kon het zijn, 1999)

Mail

But then, are your ideas so clearthe mailman asked. Just at that momentthe sky darkened,but that was another matter,things around here happen that way,from one moment to the next.

That means rain, he said, and it did.Big drops. Behind him I could see the bay,a plane leaden in the clouds,slow. It landed.

Where do such seconds go?How much rustling can be missed?Which conversations cannot bepulverized against the time-wall, in a lapseof memory, somewhere at the bottomof a dream?

Fiction, a house on a hill,the psalm of rain, page six,maillman, descent, downward pathinto oblivion,his, mine,that fat of timeas someone might turn a pagewithout having read,

all writtenfor nothing.

—Translated from the Dutch by Leonard Nathan and Herlinde Spahr

(from Zo kon ket zijn, 1999)

Harbolorifa

So many forms of existence? So many creaturesto suffer and laugh in these stony hills!

The figtree is bent toward the south,above us the soft snoring of a plane.

My friend is waiting near a bush with sharp thorns.He knows the story of his fate,

we see the glitter of the seaamong gallnuts and thistles, a sail in the distance.

Everything sleeps. give me some other life and I won't take it.Shells and crickets, my cup is full of eternal noon.

The stream I drank from yesterday was cool and clear.I saw the laurel tree's reflection. I saw the shadow

of the leaves drifty away across the bottomThis was all I ever wanted. Harbalorifa!

My age hangs on a thread. So I am the spiderabove the path, weaving its polygonal time